Katey Rich: Well, Mike, I don’t want to say it’s entirely because of you that I spent my Friday night watching Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Haynes is a major filmmaker, the documentary got good reviews out of Cannes, and the Velvet Underground is one of the many major bands I always feel like I should know more about beyond that banana album cover. But I did know that you loved the movie, and I figured it would be interesting for me, someone who knew virtually nothing about the band, to see if it worked for me too.
And it really did! It’s a comprehensive history of this one band and the people who made it, but even more importantly the era that created them, from the Fluxus art scene where John Cale got his start to Andy Warhol and the Factory. Haynes draws on archival video from the era to accompany the talking heads in a way that feels much more imaginative than the average documentary—I don’t want to say it’s experimental art exactly, but it definitely has a spirit of discovery, like you want to go look up some Fluxus films yourself when you’re done.
But it was in the more traditional parts of the documentary that I felt a little left behind, particularly when it came to Lou Reed, who participates in the documentary only via archival interviews (he died in 2013). He was obviously such a driving force behind the band, and the relationship between him and John Cale must have been volcanic— but their falling-out, subsequent reunion, and even their artistic process get kind of glossed over. As a Velvet Underground die-hard, Mike, did you feel like that was missing too? Or is the “he said, he said” of their breakup something I should just dig into the memoirs to find?
Mike Hogan: Hey, Katey, I’m proud to have had any role whatsoever in getting you to experience this film and the Velvet Underground’s music. Watching Haynes’s gorgeous and seductive treatment of the material, I realized that I feel very lucky to have discovered their music when I was a teenager, thanks to a friend who went deep down the Lou Reed rabbit hole. To answer your question about the memoirs, I think the thing to do is immediately order Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil’s profane, insane, and indispensable oral history of punk, which draws a line from the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, thereby enshrining them as the parents of the entire genre. Most of the gossipy stuff from the film is there, but the context is obviously different. Haynes is more interested than McCain and McNeil in the Velvet Underground’s roots in (and contributions to) experimental art, film, and music, and in Lou Reed’s complicated role in gay history. Reed’s sexuality has always been a bit of a puzzle. It’s tempting, in retrospect, to simplify the story by saying he was a gay man who could never fully accept that aspect of himself, in part because as a child he was subjected to shock therapy in an attempt to “cure” him. (His sister has denied this, saying her parents were “blazing liberals” who were trying to address his mental health issues.) But what, then, is one to make of his late-in-life love story with Laurie Anderson, seemingly the only time in his life he came close to being content?
Anyway, back to Reed and Cale. I don’t know that it was actually that complicated. The way I see it, Cale was interested in musical innovation, while Reed, as Haynes shows us, had one goal from the time he was in his early teens: He wanted to be a rock star. One of my favorite parts of the film is hearing Cale talk about how he was trying to compete with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and felt he had an advantage because no one would ever be able to figure out how he tuned his instrument. That’s a delightful but arguably naive notion of competition in the pop space. Reed’s version was more brutal but also maybe more realistic: I need to play guitar and sing in a band, and I need a gimmick. I don’t want to dismiss Reed’s artistry as a gimmick by any means. But throughout his career he got a lot of mileage from being the guy who could be meaner, more transgressive, and more unflinchingly adept at freaking out the squares than pretty much anybody else. To get noticed, he needed more than that. John Cale helped him find a unique and spellbinding musical counterpart to his lyrics. Andy Warhol helped him reach an audience of downtown scenesters and uptown art people who otherwise surely would have had no time for this suburban piker. And Nico helped bring a softness, sophistication, and mysterious weirdness to songs that, as V.U. drummer Moe Tucker puts it, might not even have worked otherwise. (Sung by a man, “Femme Fatale” arguably becomes a portrait of misogyny rather than jealousy.)
All of that is a long way of saying that when Reed decided that one of these people was holding him back rather than helping him, he dropped them. Often in a pretty spectacularly passive-aggressive way. Didn’t he send guitarist Sterling Morrison to tell Cale he was out of the band? Didn’t they record an entire album, White Light/White Heat, while basically not talking to one another? I think Reed was chasing his muse and didn’t really think much about anyone else.
